'Writing with admirable lucidity and disposing a wide knowledge of technical questions in philosophy as well as of legal theory and constitutional history, Bassham competently distinguishes the quite distinct ideas that go, or could go, under the name of originalism.' |s CANADIAN PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS.

How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer’s original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we examined intuitions about artifact categorization among the Shuar, a hunter-horticulturalist society in the Amazon region of (...) Ecuador. We used a forced-choice method similar to previous studies, but unlike these studies, our scenarios involved artifacts that would be familiar to the Shuar. We also incorporated a community condition to examine the possible effect of community consensus on how artifacts are categorized. The same scenarios were presented to university student participants in the UK. Across populations and conditions, participants tended to categorize artifacts in terms of a creator’s intent as opposed to a differing current use. This lends support to the view that the design stance may be a universal feature of human cognition. However, we conclude with some thoughts on the limitations of the present method for studying artifact concepts. (shrink)

As capitalist economies have shifted their primary focus from providing goods and services for all, to concentrating wealth at the top echelons of societies, social entrepreneurs have been one source of re-capturing the original intent of capitalism. Social entrepreneurs have combined the efficiency and effectiveness of business organizations with the social concerns of many non-profit and governmental agencies. As a result, social entrepreneurship is viewed as having significant potential for alleviating many of the social ills we now face. (...) To accomplish this mission, however, will require expansion of social enterprises beyond their current footprints. We explore alternate methods of expansion, scaling and replication, and then examine potential catalysts, which can enable social entrepreneurs to attain their goals of social improvement. The catalysts we identify are effectual logic, enhanced legitimacy through appropriate reporting metrics, and information technology. We conclude with two brief case studies that exemplify how these catalysts are currently working to enhance the effectiveness of social start-ups. (shrink)

As its title suggests, this is a book about constitutional interpretation. More specifically it is an articulation and defense of that particular method of constitutional interpretation, known as originalism, which looks to the original intent of the constitution’s framers as a benchmark against which interpretation is to be made. Professor Whittington believes “that originalism is the method most consistent with the judicial effort to interpret the written constitutional text and that an originalist jurisprudence facilitates the realization of a (...) political system grounded on popular sovereignty”. I think it is fair to say that in the current legal, political, and philosophical climate, originalist theories are pretty much on the defensive, which makes Whittington’s book all the more timely and valuable. (shrink)

Husserl's phenomenology provides theory for empirical science and other practices in the form of transcendental philosophy after Kant. This phenomenology is a reflection on mental objects in relation to mental processes, some of which are shared in culture: a theoretical framework that grounds and co-ordinates theory-production for empirical practice. The importance of the original work of Edmund Husserl for contemporary empirical psychology is that it provides the conceptual justification for the methods employed and the interpretative stances taken. Informed theoretically (...) by Husserl's phenomenology, empirical psychology is thus a discipline grounded and co-ordinated by essences. Essences are about the being of consciousness connected with other consciousness and mental senses, expressed as various forms of intentionality in connection with sense and meaning. The aim of this paper is to clarify some key features of Ideas I rather than to comment on the quality of the translation by Dahlstrom or the closeness of the readings of leading phenomenological psychologists to the original. (shrink)

The Framers understood the Constitution to be the fundamental expression of the rule of law over against the arbitrary, intemperate, and unjust “rule of men” that all too frequently existed in the political world, unfortunately both democratic as well as monarchical. Accordingly, the rule of law requires a well functioning political and legal system that includes legislative checks and balances, the separation of power between the President and Congress, an independent judiciary, federalism, etc. What happens when this “Madisonian” constitutional system, (...) designed to express “the deliberate sense of the community,” runs into a Judicial branch that, in effect, claims we live under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what we say it is. Must the Judiciary itself be subject to the rule of law, and the decisions of a constitutional majority, or does their “independence” extend to being independent of the constraints of the rule of law and, thus, decent majority rule? How did the original John Marshall Court answer these questions, and what light do the leading cases and controversies shed on the relationship between the Marshall Court and the Madisonian System? Are we facing a situation of Marshall v. Madison? (shrink)

The origins of object theory in the philosophical psychology and semantics of Alexius Meinong and the Graz school can be traced both to the insight and failure of Franz Brentano's immanent objectivity or intentional in-existence thesis. The immanence thesis is documented, together with its critical reception in Alois Höfler's Logik, Twardowski's Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, and Meinong's mature Gegenstandstheorie, in which immanent thought content and transcendent intentional object are distinguished, and Brentano's thesis of immanent intentionality as (...) the mark of the mental is reinterpreted to imply that only content is the immanently intentional component of presentations. Brentano's thought from the early immanence thesis through the so-called Immanenzkrise and his later reism is explored against the background of his students' reactions to the original 1874 intentionality thesis and its idealist implications, in the emergence of Meinong's object theory and Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. Finally, Brentano's reism in the later ontology is critically examined, as his solution to ontic problems of immanent intentionality, limiting intentional objects to transcendent concrete particulars. (shrink)

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and (...) evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention. Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition. Key Words: collaboration; cooperation; cultural learning; culture; evolutionary psychology; intentions; shared intentionality; social cognition; social learning; theory of mind; joint attention. (shrink)

In contemporary discussions of the concept of intention, the assumption is made that an intention results from a person's decision, or resolution, or plan, or the like. And the intention persists, generally, until the appropriate action is carried out. However, intentions cannot be said to have temporal duration, or beginnings, or endings. And it is not necessary for a person who is intending to do something to have made a decision to do it, or a resolution, or anything else. It (...) may be that a person acquires an intention because of the circumstances that he finds himself in. If one sees that a tricycle is in front of his car, he will move it. No decision is necessary, obviously, because running over it would be contrary to common sense. Or one may gradually come to realise that he is obliged to do something and thereupon acquires the intention to do it. By focusing on one kind of intention, the “desire‐belief” theories have failed to realise that intentions originate in various ways, and for various reasons. (shrink)

L’article se propose de revenir sur la source avicennienne du concept d’intentio. Si ce concept n’est en effet pas aristotélicien, Avicenne est celui qui l’introduit en métaphysique: il est trois intentions premières, l’étant, la chose, l’un. Si le terme al-ma‘nâ indique d’abord la signification, il implique tout aussi bien une certaine manière de penser la réalité. L’article revient ainsi sur ce concept, d’abord utilisé par le kalâm comme dans le cadre de la grammaire, mais aussi utilisé en théologie, pour rendre (...) compte de la Trinité. On peut alors mieux comprendre comment son intégration par Avicenne à la métaphysique n’est pas neutre, mais est l’indice d’une attention nouvelle, non seulement à l’étant, mais à la chose. La question de l’intentionnalité ne se joue donc pas seulement dans le cadre de la psychologie et de la théorie, mais elle engage le sens même du projet métaphysique. (shrink)

This book reverses the fundamental tenet of phenomenology-that all consciousness is intentional . Mitscherling rehabilitates the pre-modern concepts of 'intentional being' and 'formal causality' in the construction of a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of embodiment, aesthetic experience, interpretation of texts, moral behavior, and cognition.

Star Wars action figures can help illuminate some theories about the science of the mind and how religious thinking originated. Playing with action figures illustrates how a science of the mind is possible and what can go wrong in the religious mind. In the twentieth century, philosophers began to think of new ways to study the mind. The key is to switch from a first‐person view to a third‐person perspective. Playing with Star Wars action figures illustrates Daniel Dennett's theory of (...) how a science of the mind is possible. To illustrate, this chapter presents a vintage Blue Snaggletooth action figure that sells for hundreds of dollars on eBay. The chapter highlights that understanding what happens when we play with action figures can reveal how a science of mind is possible and illuminate a theory of the origins of the religious mind. (shrink)

A year ago the documents included in this piece were sent out from three locations to three threads of thinkers. Including a small description of the drift process, the Welcome Letter, Protocol & Guidelines, as well as the Statement of Intent are reproduced here in their entirety. This statement was previously published by continent. in-between a conversation of the drift guest editors in issue 2.3.

Recent empirical work calls into question the so-called Simple View that an agent who A’s intentionally intends to A. In experimental studies, ordinary speakers frequently assent to claims that, in certain cases, agents who knowingly behave wrongly intentionally bring about the harm they do; yet the speakers tend to deny that it was the intention of those agents to cause the harm. This paper reports two additional studies that at first appear to support the original ones, but argues that (...) in fact, the evidence of all the studies considered is best understood in terms of the Simple View. (shrink)

This collection of ten essays elucidates some of the more challenging aspects of Anscombe’s work and affirms her reputation as one of our most original ...

Ten years ago, one of us proposed a dynamic hierarchical model of intentions that brought together philosophical work on intentions and empirical work on motor representations and motor control (Pacherie, 2008). The model distinguished among Distal intentions, Proximal intentions, and Motor intentions operating at different levels of action control (hence the name DPM model). This model specified the representational and functional profiles of each type of intention, as well their local and global dynamics, and the ways in which they interact. (...) A core insight of the model was that action control is the result of integrated, coordinated activity across these levels of intention. Since the proposal of the model, empirical and theoretical works in philosophy and cognitive science have emerged that would seem to support and expand on this central insight. In particular, an updated understanding of the nature of sensorimotor processing and motor representations, as well as of how the different levels of intention and control interface and interact, allows for the further specification and precisification of the original DPM model. (shrink)

Amy saves a man from drowning despite the risk to herself, because she is moved by his plight. This is a quintessentially supererogatory act: an act that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Beth, on the other hand, saves a man from drowning because she wants to get her name in the paper. On this second example, opinions differ. One view of supererogation holds that, despite being optional and good, Beth’s act is not supererogatory because she is not (...) praiseworthy; the other agrees that Beth is not praiseworthy but holds that her act is nevertheless supererogatory because, while supererogatory actions are generally performed by praiseworthy agents, an individual need not be praiseworthy for their act to be supererogatory. In this paper, I raise a problem for this latter position, which I shall call the Anti-Motivation View of supererogation. While the Anti-Motivation View rejects the claim that the agent’s motivations are important, it accepts that the agent’s intentions are. Thus, this view assumes that a clear, coherent distinction can be drawn between intentions and motivations in the context of supererogation. This distinction is often attributed to Mill; however, his original discussion reveals an inconsistency. Consider Clara, who saves a man from drowning because she wants to torture him later. According to Mill, Clara’s act is not morally good; those who follow Mill will have to accept that it is therefore not supererogatory. Mill asserts that Clara’s act differs from Amy’s and Beth’s not just in motivation but also in intention. I question this explanation and demonstrate that the distinction between motivation and intention is not as clear as the Anti-Motivation View has supposed and that the gap between the Anti-Motivation View and the alternative Praise-Based View is either much greater or much smaller than previously thought. (shrink)

In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially ...

This chapter focuses on a question: how does the intentionality of language 'derive' from the original intentionality of thought. Hardly any philosopher of language would deny that if something is an expression which has meaning in a population, then that is by virtue of facts about the linguistic behavior and psychological states of members of that population. The chapter starts with a reconstruction of Lewis's account of the relation in Convention because a problem that immediately arises for that account (...) provides a natural segue to the more ambitious Intention‐Based Semantics (IBS) project. IBS is a program for reducing all questions about the intentionality of speech acts and linguistic expressions to questions about the intentionality of thought. It takes as foundational in the theory of meaning a certain notion of speaker‐meaning and seeks to define it, without recourse to any semantic notions, in terms of acting with certain audience‐directed intentions. (shrink)

Memories are mental states with a number of interesting features. One of those features seems to be their having an intentional object. After all, we commonly say that memories are about things, and that a subject represents the world in a certain way by virtue of remembering something. It is unclear, however, what sorts of entities constitute the intentional objects of memory. In particular, it is not clear whether those are mind-independent entities in the world or whether they are mental (...) entities of some kind. The purpose of this chapter is to map the different positions on this issue, and to highlight the virtues and difficulties for each of the options. In Section 2, I will specify the question of what the intentional objects of memory are by clarifying the relevant notions of memory and intentional object. In Section 3, I will motivate the significance of identifying the intentional objects of memory by exploring the relations between, on the one hand, the intentionality of memory and, on the other hand, the phenomenology and the epistemology of memory. In Section 4, I will consider two natural candidates for being the intentional objects of memory, namely, worldly entities and mental entities, and I will raise some concerns for each of the two candidates. A promising alternative will emerge, in Section 5, as preserving the virtues of the two original candidates while avoiding their difficulties. The alternative will concern a certain combination of worldly and mental entities; a combination that involves both causal and truth-making relations. I will conclude by sketching how the alternative candidate can shed some light on the phenomenological and epistemological issues raised in the third section. (shrink)

This volume brings together a distinguished, international list of scholars to explore the role of the learner's intention in knowledge change. Traditional views of knowledge reconstruction placed the impetus for thought change outside the learner's control. The teacher, instructional methods, materials, and activities were identified as the seat of change. Recent perspectives on learning, however, suggest that the learner can play an active, indeed, intentional role in the process of knowledge restructuring. This volume explores this new, innovative view of conceptual (...) change learning using original contributions drawn from renowned scholars in a variety of disciplines. The volume is intended for scholars or advanced students studying knowledge acquisition and change, including educational psychology, developmental psychology, science education, cognitive science, learning science, instructional psychology, and instructional and curriculum studies. (shrink)

Ethics Without Intention tackles the questions raised by difficult moral dilemmas by providing a critical analysis of double effect and its most common ethical and political applications. The book discusses the philosophical distinction between intended harm and foreseen but unintended harm. This distinction, which, according to the doctrine of double effect, makes a difference to the moral justification of actions, is widely applied to some of the most controversial ethical and political questions of our time: collateral damages in wars and (...) acts of terrorism; palliative care, euthanasia, abortion, and embryo research; self-defence, suicide, and self-sacrifice. It is also crucial to the now notorious theoretical cases of the trolley problem and the knobe effect. -/- Di Nucci approaches the doctrine of double effect from four key directions: its historical origins, which can be traced further back than the classic attribution to Aquinas; its theoretical coherence, which is the subject of a lively contemporary debate in philosophy; its moral intuitiveness, which has always been taken for granted but has recently begun to be questioned; and finally its relevance to the difficult moral and political decisions of our time. An engaging and comprehensive introduction to the doctrine of double effect. (shrink)

Subjects estimated the time of intentions to perform an action, of the action itself, or of an auditory effect of the action. A perceptual attraction or binding effect occurred between actions and the effects that followed them. Judgements of intentions did not show this binding, suggesting they are represented independently of actions and their effects. In additional unpredictable judgement conditions, subjects were instructed only after each trial which of these events to judge, thus discouraging focussed attention to a specific event. (...) Stronger binding effects were found, with intention, action and effect fusing to a single central point in time. In a control task, subjects reported the time of the first or second tone in sequence. Tone sequences showed no binding at all when subjects knew in advance which tone to judge, but showed the same fusion as actions when the event to be judged was not predictable. Binding of actions and effects, but not of tone sequences, occurs pre-attentively, and automatically. The data are consistent with a reconstructive process, implemented after actions, which generates a coherent sense of agency. However, this process should only be triggered only when our actions make it appropriate. We suggest that this mechanism is triggered in advance by efferent processing. This conclusion was supported by a further study in deafferented subject IW. This subject showed the normal binding of a tone towards an action, although his experience of the action was of pre-motor, rather than peripheral origin. The experience of intentional action involves an interplay between pre-motor and reconstructive processes. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic analysis of the various steps of goal-processing and intention creation, as the final outcome of goal-driven action generation. Intention theory has to be founded on goal theory: intentions require means-end reasoning and planning, conflict resolution, coherence. The process of intention formation and intentional action execution is strictly based on specific sets of beliefs (predictions, evaluations, calculation of costs, responsibility beliefs, competence, etc.). The origin of an intention is not necessarily a “desire” (which is just a (...) kind of goal). Intention is a two-layered goal-structure: the intended action(s) to be executed, and the intended outcome motivating that action—with two distinct kinds of “failure”. This belief-goal perspective also allows to examine two stages/types of intention, and the relations and differences between intention “in agenda” (future directed) and intention under execution (intention in action). I will argue that the will is much more than the intention driving an intentional action. I will also claim that intentions are not there just for motivating and regulating intentional actions (from the motor level to more complex behaviors), but that they play also several other important roles. (shrink)

If we ascribe someone an intention we presuppose that his actions are directed towards a goal. The origin of the word “intention” is derived from the Latin word “tendere” which means “to strain” or “tense” (a muscle) and together with the prefix “in” the word denotes someone’s “focusing on” or “being directed at an object”. If someone intends to do something one is directed towards an ob-jective. Whereas intention is a set of coordinated acts as part of an overall en-deavour (...) to achieve X, the objective is X itself. In English the expression intention is used for a determination to act in a certain way. The related expression ‘purpose’ denotes as well an intention or plan but additionally points to the reason for an action. German has the two expressions ‘Intention’ and ‘Absicht’. Both are synonymous but with ‘Absicht’ it is usually assumed that measures have been taken to achieve an envisaged objective. As such it was particularly used in Austrian officialese of the state administration in the late 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. Whereas “intention” points to a person’s orientation or tendency towards an aim, “Ab-sicht” implies an elaborated plan ready to be put in practice. The word “Zweck” corresponds to purpose in English and refers to aspects, such as the function, benefit or application of an objective. (shrink)

The work's central thesis is that meaningful discourse would be impossible unless the discoursers had distributive access to realities structured independently of language, such an access in fact as can service a metaphysically significant correspondence theory of truth. The thesis is deployed against the view, advanced by Hilary Putnam and by Richard Rorty, that we cannot exit the circle of words so as to secure any version of external realism. ;To establish the thesis, an intentionalist hermeneutics is developed: Due to (...) the plasticity of lexical meanings, the meaning of a text cannot be compositionally derived from linguistic conventions alone; the author's intentions, constituted in part by the extra-linguistic narrative matrices framing his life, must be consulted. The finding that a text's ontological commitments are determined by authorial intentions blocks Putnam's attempt to derive the ontological indeterminacy of human discourse from the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. And his charge that this appeal to intentions is circular is faulted for its reliance on an inadequate, psycholinguistic model of intentions. ;It is then argued that meaningful discourse must be anchored, through narratively coherent transactions conducted without words, to realities structured beyond words: Our pre-linguistic ancestors could never have developed a meaningful description scheme unless its terms elicited among its original users sub-linguistic reality-negotiating strategies appropriate to encountered realities, strategies like those displayed by alexic brutes. The internal realist's claim that our grasp of reality is everywhere structured by language is consequently afforded a corrective supplement: That our grasp of language is everywhere structured by a sub-linguistic grasp of reality. The strategies our pre-linguistic ancestors used to locate and manage encountered realities indispensably underlie our present use of language and provide us with an extra-linguistic access to those realities, an access that is sufficient, it is argued, to support a substantive correspondence theory of truth: An assertion corresponds to reality as long as the reality-negotiating strategies it conjugates can be successfully implemented. And this truth-conferring conception of correspondence, constituted by an appropriateness to reality, can arguably sustain a robust version of realism. (shrink)

An agent's intentional doings are often taken to be those for which a certain sort of teleological explanation is available: they are the ones that can be fitted into sequences of the form 'agent A-s in order to B, B-s in order to C, and so on'. It is natural to think that such teleological orderings are produced entirely by the agent's own (perhaps idealized) practical reasoning, and that they thus reveal the intentions with which the agent acts: he A-s (...) with the intention of thereby B-ing, B-s with the intention of thereby C-ing, and so on. This in turn suggests that if an agent X-s 'non-basically', he X-s intentionally if and only if he does something else with the intention of thereby X-ing. But what an agent intentionally does can also depend upon how his doings fit into 'autonomous teleologies' - teleologies having their origins outside of his will. If an agent intentionally A-s as part of his job, he might thereby intentionally A-s, where A-ing consists in operating a machine, he might thereby intentionally B not because his intention in A-ing is to B, but because A-ing is for the sake of B-ing in the machine's teleology. (shrink)

The problem of intentional identity, as originally offered by Peter Geach, says that there can be an anaphoric link between an indefinite term and a pronoun across a sentential boundary and across propositional attitude contexts, where the actual existence of an individual for the indefinite term is not presupposed. In this paper, a semantic resolution to this elusive puzzle is suggested, based on a new quantified intensional logic and game-theoretic semantics (GTS) of imperfect information. This constellation leads to an expressive (...) intensional language with a property of informational independence, argued to produce a purely semantic explication to intentional identity statements. One consequence is that various extra-logical and pragmatic factors become of secondary concern; it is possible to solve the puzzle by logico-semantic methods, albeit somewhat radically renewed ones. (shrink)

How is mind related to matter? This ancient question in philosophy is rapidly becoming a core problem in science, perhaps the most important of all because it probes the essential nature of man himself. The origin of the problem is a conflict between the mechanical conception of human beings that arises from the precepts of classical physical theory and the very different idea that arises from our intuition: the former reduces each of us to an automaton, while the latter allows (...) our thoughts to guide our actions. The dominant contemporary approaches to the problem attempt to resolve this conflict by clinging to the classical concepts, and trying to explain away our misleading intuition. But a detailed argument given here shows why, in a scientific approach to this problem, it is necessary to use the more basic principles of quantum physics, which bring the observer into the dynamics, rather than to accept classical precepts that are profoundly incorrect precisely at the crucial point of the role of human consciousness in the dynamics of human brains. Adherence to the quantum principles yields a dynamical theory of the mind/brain/body system that is in close accord with our intuitive idea of what we are. In particular, the need for a self-observing quantum system to pose certain questions creates a causal opening that allows mind/brain dynamics to have three distinguishable but interlocked causal processes, one micro-local, one stochastic, and the third experiential. Passing to the classical limit in which the critical difference between zero and the finite actual value of Planck's constant is ignored not only eliminates the chemical processes that are absolutely crucial to the functioning of actual brains, it simultaneously blinds the resulting theoretical construct to the physical fine structure wherein the effect of mind on matter lies: the use of this limit in this context is totally unjustified from a physics perspective. (shrink)

John Passmore was a renowned Australian empirical philosopher and historian of ideas. In this book, which was originally published in 1952, Passmore's intention was to disentangle certain main themes in Hume's philosophy and to show how they relate to Hume's main philosophic purpose. Rather than offering a detailed commentary, the text provides an account based on specificity and critical scholarship, seeking to complement the other more comprehensive works on Hume's philosophy that had become available around the same time. This book (...) will be of value to anyone with an interest in perspectives on Hume and Passmore's philosophical approach. (shrink)

This book explores the logic and historical origins of a strange taboo that has haunted literary critics since the 1940s, keeping them from referring to the intentions of authors without apology. The taboo was enforced by a seminal article, "The Intentional Fallacy," and it deepened during the era of poststructuralist theory. Even now, when the vocabulary of "critique" that has dominated the literary field is under sweeping revision, the matter of authorial intention has yet to be reconsidered. This work explains (...) how "The Intentional Fallacy" confused different kinds of authorial intentions and how literary critics can benefit from a more up-to-date understanding of intentionality in language. The result is a challenging inventory of the resources of literary theory, including implied readers, poetic speakers, omniscient narrators, interpretive communities, linguistic indeterminacy, unconscious meaning, literary value, and the nature of literature itself. (shrink)

Cappelen and Dever challenge the widely accepted idea that some key aspect of intentional action is essentially indexical. They argue that the classical arguments for this coming from Perry are in fact arguments for a different phenomenon: the opacity of explanatory contexts. I agree with Cappelen and Dever that what Perry says about the ineliminability of indexical terms from explanations of intentional action fails to amount to an argument for this indexicality being essential. But this should not lead us to (...) be sceptics. In this paper, I present a different argument for the essential indexicality of intentional actions. The key premise of this argument is that intentions themselves are essentially indexical. I provide evidence for this premise and defend it against potential criticism. I also show how the essential indexicality of intentions can be used to vindicate Perry's original claims about the essential indexicality of certain beliefs and desires. (shrink)

The view that first-person (de se) mental content is essential to the explanation of action in general is a strong essential indexicality thesis. A weaker essential indexicality claim is that de se mental content is an essential ingredient of intentional action. An argument by Bermúdez for the former thesis and an argument from Babb in support of the latter are discussed in Section 2, and for reasons presented there it seems that both arguments are unsound and the conclusions are false (...) as well. However, the discussion of their arguments helps us identify a certain class of intentional action, and an apparently very large class, the members of which are guaranteed to have de se origin. This class of intentional action is identified in Sections 3 and 4 and it is shown that necessarily, any member of this class has its origin in indexical, specifically, de se mental content. (shrink)

To what extent can an agent be held responsible for what he does? According to Aristotle, we are answerable for our voluntary actions, the “voluntary” being “[1] that of which the origin is in oneself, [2] when one knows the particular factors that constitute the location of action.” This question, which was of paramount importance for Anscombe, led her to focus on the second, epistemic condition of responsibility. This chapter suggests that in fact, a large part of her philosophy of (...) action can be read as an effort to build a complex and subtle answer to the question what kind of knowledge an agent must have of his own action in order for him to be accountable for it (and/or for all or some of its consequences). In Intention, Anscombe shows that for his action to be intentional under some description, an agent must have a practical knowledge of it under this very description; that is why ignorance can sometimes be put forward as a ground for exoneration. But ignorance can also be blameworthy, when the agent could and should have known what he is ignorant of. Elucidating the possibility of voluntary ignorance brings into light a fundamental obligation to know which takes its meaning from, and has its roots in, Anscombe’s Thomist background. (shrink)

This book includes ten original essays that critically examine central themes of John Searle’s ontology of society, as well as a new essay by Searle that summarizes and further develops his work in that area. The critical essays are grouped into three parts. Part I (Aspects of Collective Intentionality) examines the account of collective intention and action underlying Searle’s analysis of social and institutional facts, with special emphasis on how that account relates to the dispute between individualism and anti-individualism (...) in the analysis of social behaviour, and to the opposition between internalism and externalism in the analysis of intentionality. Part II (From Intentions to Institutions: Development and Evolution) scrutinizes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic credentials of Searle’s view that, unlike other kinds of social facts, institutional facts are uniquely human, and develops original suggestions concerning their place in human evolution and development. Part III (Aspects of Institutional Reality) focuses on Searle’s claim that institutional facts owe their existence to the collective acceptance of constitutive rules whose effect is the creation of deontic powers, and examines central issues relevant to its assessment (among others, the status of the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, the significance of the distinction between brute and deontic powers, the issue of the logical derivability of normative from descriptive propositions, and the import of the difference between moral and non-moral normative principles). Written by an international team of philosophers and social scientists, the essays aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle’s work on the ontology of society, and to suggest new approaches to fundamental questions in that research area. (shrink)